


waltz of four left feet

by aberfaeth



Category: Hinatazaka46 (Band)
Genre: F/F, im also not a stem student so why did i even do this, im not a logician im just trying my best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26190172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aberfaeth/pseuds/aberfaeth
Summary: mikuni knows a thing or two about academics.
Relationships: Takahashi Mikuni/Morimoto Marii
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	waltz of four left feet

mikuni would never admit to liking academics.

but she cultivated a reputation that labeled her as  the majime kid in school, leaving her no other choice but to fulfill it.

when she announced that she’d be auditioning to be in an idol group, people would repeatedly say they never saw it coming. well, neither did mikuni.

she doesn’t believe in soulmates. it’s an imbecilic excuse to leave the outcome of your entire life in the hands of something that is less visible than a subatomic being.

and yeah, sure, she has not yet seen a sole atom particle more than she’s seen destiny, but she knows it exists because it’s there and it’s been proven and she could put her hands against it and feel its warmth. that’s what  matter is.

soulmates are trickier to theorize.

but when she was halfway out of the building on her third day as a trainee, she sees one practice room with the lights still on and she takes a little peak.

the stereo playing is on maximum volume but the sound is faint when it travels to mikuni's ears.

she’s  morimoto marii. mikuni knows because she’s had everyone’s names written on the attendance sheet memorized and marii is the only one left that was not introduced.

marii moves in a way water wished it could and mikuni struggles to explain and rationalize it in ways she’s familiar with.

someone must’ve turned the speaker off because when their eyes meet, she could swear the world turned silent. 

she focused too much on the girl dancing, she forgets to do the math until she gets home later.

mikuni recalls no pressure or air conditioning in that room, three hundred forty three meters per second was supposed to be the speed of sound at that moment but she must’ve made a mistake.

surely, she must have, or everything she ever believed in would fall apart right before her eyes, herself included.

/

mikuni fixes her mistake when she and marii are partnered together for a dance.

the world does not turn silent when she meets marii's eyes, no.

her mind just blocks everything out of her consciousness when marii smiles at her.

it’s silly, mikuni thinks, but it’s more plausible than saying fuck it, and then questioning a universal constant.

“takahashi-san,” marii says when she approaches, her phone in hand, “your number. so i can update you with next week’s schedule.”

mikuni takes the device, trying to ignore the synapses in her brain short circuiting when they brushed hands, “just takahashi is fine.”

she inputs the digits and hands the phone back to the other girl, leaving the contact name blank. 

“well then, you can just call me morimoto, or marii. or anything you’d like, really. i wouldn’t mind.” she says with a smile before leaving.

_i want to call you mine._

/

marii strains her ankle the very next week and mikuni finally understands the common folks.

because as she dances in front of the mirror while marii is nursing her feet on a corner with some ice, she can’t help but also feel an ache in her chest whenever marii flinches in pain.

a change in one will affect the other, mikuni thinks as she stops the music and sits by marii's side.

when she wraps the swollen ankle in a cold towel, marii drags her arms across mikuni's forehead to wipe her sweat.

she knows einstein was right to call it a  spooky action because marii is too close and she’s too much of a coward to make a move and the room is too warm all of a sudden (which could be another miscalculation on her part but she’s keeping it at the back of her head for now).

quantum entanglement says that when two particles are entangled — what ever occurs on one particle can have an impact on the other, mikuni reckons,  that is the idea of soulmates, at a subatomic level.

well, at least she can strike soulmates out of her list of unexplainable things humans believe in. 

“yoroshiku onegaishimasu.” marii tells her the first time they were officially introduced, and mikuni says it back.

“yoroshiku onegaishimasu.” 

it might have been empty greetings at that moment, but when mikuni looks back at the memory, she feels like she was saying, “i’m now in your care; mess with my head, make me question my entire existence, leave me broken, go ahead. i’m all yours.”

/

mikuni never cries. when she does, it’s mostly basal and reflex tears that come out, to lubricate her eyes, and a reaction to foreign matter, like dirt or smoke.

it’s not that she can’t cry; she just does not want to. 

it’s the one thing she despises about the human body. millennia after millennia of continuous evolution and the best response to emotional stress the brain can come up with is water flowing out of the parts she uses to see the world.

it’s not all that bad, though, she thinks. with acth, a stress hormone, emotional tears also comes with enkephalin—painkiller, which is a fair bargain.

“i’ll give ¥1000 to anyone who sees takahashi cry!” marii tells everyone in the practice room after being ruthlessly scolded by the dance instructor, all of them in tears, except mikuni—who’s sat at a corner, rewinding the steps in her head and analyzing.

glide, then step back, a short skip, followed by a roll, another glide, spin, a wave of hands, split, heels up, knees down— _shit._ that’s it. that’s what i got wrong, she thinks, closing her eyes and bumping her head against the wall repeatedly, replaying her mistake over and over and over again.

mikuni never cries, but she understands the necessity of crying. it’s a natural response, but she refuses to succumb to it. she is not weak. it’s only been a month of training; if she gives in now, what are her chances of debuting? how would she cope in a lifestyle as physically and emotionally draining as an idol?

“hey,” a voice calls out to her, familiar, she could even argue that it’s her favorite voice in the world. it’s only when she feels a tap on her shoulder that she opens her eyes. “i was kidding. if anyone ever makes you cry, i will rip their throat out with my bare hands.”

“that is… reassuring, but gruesome, and physically impossible for you,” mikuni replies, “unless it’s a newborn infant.” 

marii's pretty, so pretty, face contorts, “god, takahashi, that’s super dark.”

mikuni shrugs, offering her towel and water bottle to the other girl, “your eyes are puffy.”

“i know!” marii sighs, “i should probably take a shower and clean up. i’m meeting with my boyfriend later.”

boyfriend…?

“i, uh,” mikuni tries to find words that are less accusatory than  _why?_ “i didn’t know you had a boyfriend,”

“oh? i thought i mentioned it before.” 

_if you did, i wouldn’t be here, rapidly blinking, trying to process this new information._

“text me when you get home,” marii tells her, ruffling her hair before standing up to leave, “gotta go!”

when mikuni feels a lump in her throat and the heat spiking up in the back of her eyes, she tries to fight it.

well, the keyword is tries.

the dam breaks and mikuni purses her lips to make it stop. please make it stop.

when marii comes in the next day and haruyo asks for ¥1000, she never leaves mikuni's side until she walks her home.

/

mikuni would never admit to liking academics.

for her to be able to admit something, she must first encode it in rational logic. she adopts a vocabulary with two object constants (marii and mikuni), and one binary relation constant (likes). 

with this, and the information mikuni holds true, she could completely characterize the state of affairs between them as following: 

likes(mikuni, marii)

¬ likes(marii, mikuni)

likes(mikuni,mari) is used to express a relation between mikuni and marii, specifically the claim that mikuni likes marii. ¬likes(marii, mikuni) claims that marii  dislikes mikuni, but if she had the tiniest ounce of hope, she would like to add a disjunction just to see the odds. encoding a sentence with a disjunctive noun phrase is facilitated by first rewriting the sentence as a disjunction of simple sentences;  marii likes mikuni or marii likes her boyfriend. in rational logic, we can express this fact as a simple disjunction with two possibilities as disjuncts:

likes(marii,mikuni) ∨ likes(marii,her boyfriend)

if marii likes everyone who likes her, in other words, if some guy likes marii, marii likes that guy back, then we use a universal quantifier to express this claim.

∀y.(likes(y,marii) ⇒ likes(marii,y)

if marii likes somebody who likes her, the word somebody here is a tip-off that we need to use an existential quantifier.

∃y.(likes(marii,y) ∧ likes(y,marii)

/

it doesn’t take long for marii to notice. after all, mikuni wasn’t exactly subtle with her staring and heart eyes and  'here, take my water bottle’s.

she just wished she would not be confronted by the reality too soon. 

the principle of quantum superposition isn’t a game of probability; there isn’t a 50/50 chance of marii liking her back, there are only two states—marii liking her as a friend, and marii not liking her at all. 

because she has a boyfriend. 

kaito, mikuni learned his name was. she’s never seen him before, but she’s seen the smile on marii's face whenever he calls her on the phone—and she wants to hate him, she really does—but she sees the lines mapping the surface of marii's face, her lips curved upward as she mutters his name, and mikuni just wants to thank him.

she has to remind herself that this isn’t schrödinger’s cat.

_ i don’t have to live with the knowledge that i killed a cat if i don’t open the box. _

and yet, mikuni hopes it’s alive.

/

everybody loves marii is translated as  ∀ x. ∃ y.(loves(x, y)  ∧ marii(y)) and mikuni doesn’t need to follow her usual train of thought to prove that the claim is true because she witnesses it everyday.

marii messes with her notes one day after practice and mikuni speed-bumps at least seven people trying to catch up to her before she sees the contents of the notebook.

it’s too late, because she sees marii scratching her head as she browses the pages.

“hey, takahashi, what does this mean?” she asks as mikuni tries to catch her breath. it’s her scribbles on the last page, the worst thing she could probably possibly see.

“n-nothing! it’s just…homework.”

“huh, my name is in it, though.”

mikuni snatches the notebook from her hands and reminds herself to burn it when she gets home, “obviously, you read it wrong,” she turns around and leaves, “can we just go home?”

later, when she borrows her father’s lighter and prepares to light the whole thing on fire, she reads it for the last time and wishes it wasn’t true:

mikuni wants marii to like her.

/

marii's phone usage immensely decreases after the whole notebook ordeal, mikuni notices.

(that’s not all she noticed. marii also started to take interest in her books since then, instead of her usual  _yikes, that’s so boring_ when she sees mikuni reading in between breaks.)

“how is kaito?” mikuni asks on a vocal training day, because she’s stupid, and careless, and curious, and her tongue slipped, and maybe she’s a bit of a masochist.

“i wouldn’t know. i broke up with him last week.”

mikuni fights the muscles in her face from molding into a wide smile, but her heart is doing leaps. “oh, i’m sorry, are you okay?” she asks, clutching marii's hand.

"yeah, i realized i didn’t even like him that much.”

mikuni picks a love song to practice on and gets too carried away with the lyrics, because it’s only the two of them in the room and her heart is at ease for the first time in a while.

when she sings, she means every word, and looks at marii in such a fond way that no textbook in the universe can ever explain.

and for a fraction of a second, mikuni could swear she saw the same look being reflected back at her.

/

mikuni gets desperate and people would be able to tell immediately if they spare a glance at her bookshelf.

(okay, maybe not immediately, because she arranged the books in the order of the authors’ sexual deviancy.)

she bought shakespeare, emily bronte, nicolas sparks, and the absolute worst of all, a pablo neruda poetry book.

they don’t exactly fit in mikuni's shelf so she takes them out and leaves them under her bed.

(besides, how would she even begin to explain to someone why she thought shakespeare was two rows more sexually deviant than niels bohr?)

she's pretty comfortable with the idea that she’s more rational than the entire city population combined, but when she decides to bring a poetry book to training one day, she’s not very sure anymore.

she reads them religiously, to find an answer, a hint, or—god, please— an equation that would solve her morimoto problem.

at this point, she’d rather try to make sense and answer p versus np then take over the entire network of international security, wreck havoc and start a world war.

(yes, an equation can do that.)

but here she is, nose deep in a page with string of words that not only can’t she comprehend, but also wants to rip them out of the hardbound because some of the poems aren’t even grammatically coherent.

“what are you reading?”

of course, marii arrives. 

if mikuni believed in a higher being, she’s a hundred percent sure he’s playing a sick game with her right now and she is absolutely not happy about it.

“n-nothing,” she stutters and closes the book.

she shouldn’t have, because marii gets a glint in her eyes that lets mikuni know that she would not leave until she finds out about something.

she raises the book up, but marii tries to reach it, and it results in her face being exactly forty-four millimeters away from hers, so obviously, the book drops and marii doesn’t hesitate to read it. 

“aw, takahashi, your logician ass reads poetry?” marii says, pinching mikuni's cheek before continuing to flip through it.

“yes,” replies mikuni and caresses her swollen face, “but i don’t understand it at all.”

“i should read one for you.”

“okay.”

mikuni regrets agreeing to it immediately.

marii takes her hand and says, 

“i do not love you except because i love you;

i go from loving to not loving you,

from waiting to not waiting for you

my heart moves from cold to fire.

i love you only because it's you the one i love;

i hate you deeply, and hating you

bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you

is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

maybe january light will consume

my heart with its cruel

ray, stealing my key to true calm.

in this part of the story i am the one who

dies, the only one, and i will die of love because i love you,

because i love you, love, in fire and blood.”

mikuni feels a lump in her throat, like her heart was about to come out after being hidden away for so long.

when marii kisses her, it is not how the books described. it’s just two mouths together, wet and wild, fighting for dominance, no purpose at all—but mikuni melts into it, she welcomes it and wishes it to never end.

she knows marii could tell it’s her first kiss because she could feel her lips smiling against hers.

marii pulls away and rests her forehead on hers, eyes still closed as she catches her breath.

and then, “do you understand now?”

/

**Author's Note:**

> takamoto? thats just ayaka. morihashi? too wordy. mikurii? sounds like radium poisoning. makuni? ugly. give me suggestions for mikuni/marii pairing name please.


End file.
